Revenue growth management is becoming the connective tissue between growth strategy and execution. Learn how agentic AI can accelerate decision intelligence—grounded in financial truth, governance, and human judgment.
The objective of frictionless shopping, frictionless checkout, and autonomous stores is to improve the customer experience and increase convenience. Any of us can put ourselves in the shoes of a shopper and think about how nice it would be to never have to wait in line to give someone our money. I get that.
While most everyone politely accepted the role the industry webinar played these past 24 months, last month Shoptalk gathered nearly 10,000 retail luminaries live and in-person in Las Vegas. The event was held from March 27 to March 30, 2022, at Mandalay Bay for the industry’s biggest reunion yet.
This is a transformative time in retail. In talking to industry leaders, clear trends emerge, including the growing importance of unlocking consumer insights balanced with privacy, the need for tighter omnichannel experience, the challenge of mitigating supply chain disruptions, and not compromising on sustainability.
It’s that time of the year again.
If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that it will take all of us working together to ensure the future of retail is meeting today’s consumer needs. The world of retail has been forever shaped by new behaviors, and many are here to stay. Business-as-usual will no longer meet these expectations.
In every industry around the world, the past several months have seen organizations adjust to challenges, pursue new business opportunities, and accelerate their digital capabilities in the face of the pandemic that has reshaped our world. Disruption demands the capacity to turn challenge into opportunity.
Holiday is the most exciting and important time in retail. It’s where all the preseason inventory planning, the ramp up in hiring of seasonal employees for stores and warehouses, the marketing events, and all the promotions come together to deliver up to 60 percent of the total year’s business for the industry.
Like so many of you, I got my first job in a retail store (after babysitting) and like many around the world it was my first introduction to the workplace. Retail always has been and always will be a people business with many employed on retail’s frontline.
We all want to be more sustainable in our day-to-day lives, as consumers and businesses. In fact, I typically consider a new brand or product specifically because of its sustainability practices. And I know I’m not alone.
While all of us experienced incredible disruption in the past year, retailers and brands emerged as one of the frontline heroes that kept us fed and alive. From farm to fork, from source to store—goods and products still had to flow.
With shoppers returning to the stores, retail investments are flowing to omnichannel priorities to digitize stores, support frontline workforce across all channels, connect inventories across platforms, and accelerate fulfillment. Recent research conducted by The Economist shows that retailer respondents saw the pace of, and investment in, digital transformation accelerate during the pandemic.
Over the past year, the pandemic fundamentally changed several industries and impacted the means of consumption and distribution for goods and services globally.
